1960s Resist NBC's Cliched Depiction

In the NBC miniseries called "The '60s" (9 p.m. Sunday and Monday, Channel 4), one brother, Brian (Jerry O'Connell), is the high school quarterback who joins the Marines and is sent to Vietnam.

He's there a long time. It feels like seven or eight years. So you won't forget him, he's onscreen every once in a while, crouching in the jungle with his helmet on, looking silly and furtive, shooting his gun.

Younger brother Michael (Josh Hamilton) is 17 but appears to be pushing 30.

He's the brainy one. He becomes a Freedom Rider in Mississippi, an anti-war activist, a Eugene McCarthy campaign worker in 1968 and, just to cover all the bases, a Bobby Kennedy campaign worker the same year.

She gets knocked up at a Northwestern frat party, hitchhikes to the Summer of Love in San Francisco -- yes, I believe she does have flowers in her hair -- begs for spare change on the street and joins the Hog Farm commune.

The geniuses who wrote this thing determined that their dad (Bill Smitrovich) should be a hawkish blue-collar, backyard- barbecue type guy from Chicago, serving conveniently as a generational punching bag.

Are we missing something? Ah, yes. We need black people, but not too many of them. Maybe as sort of a weak "B" story.

Unfortunately, the black characters have no personalities outside broad-brush positions on race. You can't have it all.

Still, wow. If only there had been another brother to become a rock star and die of a drug overdose . . .

As it is, "The '60s" comes perilously close to its own press kit tag line: "The story of their family is the story of America."

Which says a whole lot about the ridiculous overreach that makes "The '60s" the pitiful production it is. It's not a drama, it's an inventory.

In this contrived set of characters, we have entry to the civil rights movement, the Newport Folk Festival, the Watts riot, the Vietnam war, student protests at Berkeley, the student strike at Columbia, the Summer of Love, the 1967 march on the Pentagon, the McCarthy campaign, the Kennedy campaign, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Hog Farm commune and Woodstock. All present and accounted for.

I'm not sure, but I think that if you go back and examine footage from the grassy knoll in Dallas, you might spot Michael. No, Katie. All three! And Brian has his helmet on.

I believe that producer Lynda Obst ("Sleepless in Seattle," "Hope Floats") sincerely wanted to capture her formative decade on film. She has failed.

You know what "The '60s" is like? It's like doing that term paper where you pick quotations you want to use and then do a little -- written vamping to pad the space between quotes.

FILM CLIPS, SOUNDTRACK

The quotes in this case are archival film snippets and a fat soundtrack of vintage music. Brian is joining the Marines; play "Soldier Boy" by the Shirelles.

Apparently the alternating "quotes" and interstitial drama got confusing to the three-person committee that wrote "The '60s," because Michael and his girlfriend (Jordana Brewster) end up talking to each other in Bob Dylan lyrics. No kidding.

Obst, the screenwriters and director Mark Piznarski aren't the first to botch the '60s.

Even in the 1960s, films about the 1960s didn't look authentic, with the exception of the quasi-documentary "Medium Cool." Anti-war activists always looked angry on cue. Hippies always looked as if their makeup and hair had been touched up moments before the cameras rolled.

ARTIFICE SHOWS

In this miniseries, the hammy hand of artifice is at work in every frame, even with the switchbacks between color and black and white, and even in an effort to duplicate the peculiar lighting at Woodstock.

The result amounts to a Potemkin decade. "The '60s" is a facade. A small example: a scene about the Columbia University disturbance, in which viewers will see a sign reading, "Up Against the Wall, Mother."

Alas, that's a foreshortened sentiment. A little more of what was in the actual slogan, and we might have something to watch.